THC: Is there something that can be done to bring the process back into the hands of the people?

JD: I don’t know. It seems to me that my role only extends as far as trying to tell the story in some straight way. I’ve never been good at answers. [Laughs.]

THC: What similarities and differences do you see between writing fiction and nonfiction, and how do the two connect?

JD: There’s almost no connection. The only connection is that you become as absorbed in one as the other once you start working. But the whole process is totally different. With nonfiction, you start with a big block of research, both reported and from reading. You chip away at it, you shape it, but you’ve always got that in front, this objective reality that you’re going to shape. It’s a sculpting process. With a novel, you get up in the morning and there is nothing there. You have to convince yourself every single morning that this is worth doing, and then you have to spend the rest of the day thinking about what it is you’re doing. I’ve never written a novel during which I wasn’t filled with some kind of dread for most of the time I was working on it. That isn’t true of nonfiction.

THC: You used the term sculpting and I’m kind of curious about the actual process of the craft. How have computers changed your writing, if at all? How do you write?

JD: I started using a computer in 1987. It changed my mind; I’m far more logical. I learned on old-fashioned DOS. There was something so logical about DOS. You couldn’t beat it. If something went wrong, it was because you had done something wrong—a novel idea to me. DOS did for me what geometry was supposed to have done but didn’t. Writing takes me a long time. If I get a page or two a day done, I’m working really well.

Political Fictions

by Joan Didion

Knopf

338 pp., $25